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Billionaire Tilman Fertitta gave his fairly bullish take on the wildly popular digital currency bitcoin in an interview with CNBC Thursday.
Fertitta likened the cryptocurrency trend to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
"I think it's here to stay," the founder and CEO of Landry's told CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Thursday. "It's no different than anything new. Everybody forgets that if you put '.com' at the end of your name just 20 years ago, your stock ran up."
Ferititta notes one major deterrent to keeping folks from jumping into the Bitcoin fray.
"They don't have the money. It's just paper. That's all bitcoin is, is paper, but it's not insured by the FDIC today. And until it's insured, a lot of people are never going to buy it," Fertitta said.
And just as the online gambling sector jumped on board the .com bandwagon early on (casino.com snatched up $5.5 million, Gambling.com, $2.5 million), so too are they all over the crypto thrillride. There's a difference in that cryptocurrencies have aided online gambling sites in once again being able to accept and pay out at a more rapid speed with very little risk in terms of having to deal with shady middlemen. This is most true in so-called "restrictive" or "grey" markets that now encompass more than half the globe.
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